


needle in the hay

by isaac richard (isaacrichard)



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: Drug Use, F/M, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, or... not a lot of it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:14:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25644856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isaacrichard/pseuds/isaac%20richard
Summary: Elliot Alderson, through the surprised eyes of Shayla Nico.
Relationships: Elliot Alderson/Shayla Nico
Comments: 1
Kudos: 22





	needle in the hay

**Author's Note:**

> title borrowed from the elliott smith song. also im still not over Shayla's death how many years later 
> 
> enjoy <3

_“I look for the best in people,” she’ll say later, quiet. Trying to match his natural inflection._

And maybe once, a long time ago, that was true. A younger Shayla maybe believed things like that.

But now it was more like, Shayla Nico looked for the best in the people who _mattered._ And Elliot Alderson – though he brandished his modesty like a shield – mattered more than most.

She knows this as he opens his door for her, when he sheepishly steps aside as she tries to save the poor betta fish, entrusted to her by her niece not an hour ago, and already having a near-death experience. Elliot – and she knows his name because she’s already inspected his mailbox, analyzed his handwriting (it was shaky, like hers. A junkie.).

He blinks at her, a little befuddled looking, especially in the scrunched-up eyebrows. Eyebrows that gave way to endless eyes, huge and regarding. Greenish and grayish, and perpetually nearly upset-looking.

Analyzing this new component set in front of him. Analyzing her, and the flopping fish cradled in her cupped, wet hands. She smiles, apologetic. He does not match it.

Regardless, he gives the fish a humble abode on his desk for the foreseeable future. He has to explain to her what ‘QWERTY’ means.

Which he does, but while they’re both stoned. She ends up Googling it.

Shayla wasn’t a computer person – believed they were all evil, in the part of her still ingrained with Southern Baptist superstition. Not that it stopped her from having the latest iPhone, or anything.

Not that she didn't think Elliot's job wasn't badass as fuck, or anything. 

She digs out her razors for him, packed away as they were. This was a fresh start – and conveniently close to Vera’s new place of business. She was happy to have a new place, even with all the unpacking she had left.

And Elliot –

He befuddles her in turn.

For being such a shy, quiet type – he had _asked_ to kiss her, like they were in the third grade. The fish incident leads to him moving her new IKEA shit, like he really weighed much more than she did. But together, they manage. He’s clever with his hands, and more familiar with a screwdriver than she would have imagined.

And he’s _quiet._ Usually, when a guy came to help out, they chattered to the point it nearly turned her off. But Elliot Alderson is all eyes and no mouth, but it’s strangely okay. It surprises her when the silence isn’t uncomfortable. It amazes her that he doesn't ramble on to fill it.

For being such a shy, quiet type – Shayla was being wooed, intentional or not. And she wasn’t uninterested.

She becomes his main plug, via their _thing,_ and her product is always pure for him. For being such a shithead, Vera delivers what he promises. For being the only reason that their _thing_ wasn’t more than a _thing,_ but Vera was bad news.

Elliot didn’t need to be caught in that. She wouldn’t let him be. Not with all the things unspoken, the things he already carried baggage from.

And God, but does Shayla wish she could put him up on the highest shelf, in a unreachable castle, somewhere safe. Somewhere nothing bad could ever get to him, ever again.

She feels responsible for him, in a motherly way. She has the gut feeling that he had been robbed of something important. And whenever she's allowed, she holds him, correctly assuming he didn't get it often.

It was something she would never, ever admit, especially not while they were still fucking – 

Elliot doesn’t _change_ when he’s high, she notes, instead of addressing her alien, parental feelings that threaten to smother her, because he stays his same, shy self.

No matter how inhibition-reducing the drug, Elliot stayed cautious, and more aware than most junkies. He didn't get lost.

Not like Vera, with his heroin-addled rants about the cosmos, and everyone’s place in it. Not like the people who are only real when they’re high. He’s shy – quiet, still, but more receptive.

Less burdened, by whatever it was that drove him to do morphine in the first place.

Morphine had never been Shayla’s thing – she liked her acid, her ecstasy, her coke bumps on other girls' tits. Morphine was a cancer drug, for God’s sake. A whirl on morphine was like a whirl with prune juice.

But it worked for Elliot, so she never questioned it. It was nobody’s place but his own.

For being such a shy, quiet type – he thinks like a philosopher, she can see it all over his face.

Shayla had learned to read people, in her time. In her line of pharmaceutical sales, it was necessary. Nothing short of essential – it was the difference between scraping out alive, or being scraped up by the EMTs.

He’s planning something, always planning behind his large, shifty eyes. Shayla doesn’t ask, and Elliot doesn’t offer. But he slips between her thighs like a slick-heat dream, and she’s not expecting it, and not expecting it so _good._

“You’re an enigma,” she’ll say, barely recovered. He’ll smile.

“Maybe.”

And they crack up laughing. She’ll straddle him, still laughing, and his pupils in his endless eyes, shrouded by heavy lids, are blown wide. She kisses his brow bone, happy.

She liked Elliot Alderson. More than she had any right to, considering she knew nothing about him. He didn’t want to tell – and, shit, she wasn’t going to ask.

His anonymity charmed her, somehow. How he melted – like a pat of butter on pancakes – under gentle praise, that charmed her too. He was different, good different. A breath of fresh air in all the smog.

But the ball to her chain, Fernando Vera, saw a fixation.

And Shayla doesn’t even see him see it – isn’t there to tell Elliot to get the hell out of dodge, because she’s unconscious in the bathtub.

He had hurt her. Again.

Because Vera thought he ran the city, he thought he had the right to enact whatever came upon him. He had marked Shayla as his territory to Elliot, and she had no say in the matter.

_“His password? Eatadick6969.”_

“I like you, Elliot,” Shayla hears. And that scares her more than waking up in a bathtub ever would have. She shivers.

Vera’s found a new target, and she’s to blame.

They forget it. They deny it.

They go to Coney Island. Elliot gets weepy on the Ferris wheel, for reasons he either can’t or doesn’t care to articulate. Shayla becomes the archetype of a mother she knew her own would be proud of.

“You mean something to me, you know,” she says, instead of asking questions. The sun's begun to set, and she's just taken half a tab. She means what she says. 

“Promise?” His voice is too quiet. She wants to force him to speak up, defend himself to the world – but that's not his way, and she knows it. 

“You know how I feel about promises, Elliot.”

He snorts from the vial of morphine he keeps in his pocket. He tastes of it when they kiss.

He’s not demanding, in the way he moves with her. It’s a push-and-pull, wax-and-wane. _Does this work for you? Yes, what about you?_

She feels seen, by his enormous, endless eyes. She wishes she could see more of him when she looks back. 

Vera never forgets.

He’s marked Elliot as something special – _because he is,_ Shayla thinks. One of a kind. A thing of value, an important piece in Vera’s little game, where the odds increased with the more blocks he controlled.

A thing of value was a thing Fernando Vera liked to own. Burn out his shining stars and making a killing in their wake.

Vera – who, in a world without kingpins and druglords, would be nothing and nobody. He watches Elliot like a threat, and like a treat. Another whore to kick into line, in Fernando Vera’s all-knowing eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Elliot will say, over her bloodied corpse, stuffed carelessly in the trunk. It's the only thing he manages, before fading into the background, again. He stumbles into the dark.

She’ll know.


End file.
